Monthly Archives: October 2017

Valuation of Self and Others

The valuation of self is closely tied to self-awareness. One could argue that there are two extreme cases that illustrate the spectrum on which humans exist. The neurotic on one hand has an extremely depressed view of his own value, as a result of being very critical of self, whereas the narcissist has an extremely optimistic view of their own value as a result of poor self-awareness. In both cases, the person is inaccurate in their self-valuation, and suffers consequences due to this factor.

Neurotics minimize their strengths and magnify their weaknesses in their own internal perception of self. This can lead to two broad spheres of results, on one hand one has the neurotic person who achieves great success as a result of constantly improving self, and seeking better results. On the other hand one has those neurotics that view their weaknesses as too great to overcome and as a result do not work to improve themselves. In the first of these situations, the neurotic can often become a high achiever, whereas in the latter they often fail to achieve at all. The former type of neurotic often has a large gap between their perceived value and their objective value, while the inverse is true of the latter.

Narcissists maximize their strengths and are to varying degrees ignorant of their weaknesses. This can also lead to two broad spheres of results. The narcissist that is also a high achiever and as a result of this has a smaller gap between their self-perceived value and their objective value. On the other hand the narcissist that is a non-achiever, and has a large gap between their self-perceived value and their objective value.

A common observation in the valuation of self is to what one is comparing. A person in isolation can be valued differently, than a person who is valued in contrast to another. This is similar in part to how a company has a stand-alone valuation, and a benchmark valuation, the latter being when the company’s metrics are compared with that of other comparable companies. The latter is also vulnerable to the contrast effect, where a person is viewed as more or as less due to the stature of another person or another group.

When valuing others the factors that affect valuations are much the same, except that one is working from much less information. One can compare this to “insider buys” in a stock market, where someone in an advantageous position within a company, such as a member of the executive team, or the board buys shares in the open market. This is often viewed as a positive signal to the market as it means someone with a greater degree of knowledge of the company views this time as a good time to buy. When we value ourselves, we have access to every single piece of data, when we value others we have much less.

The psychological system 1 and system 2 factors outlined by Daniel Kahneman, where one can often make rapid valuations based on available visual characteristics, that have a greater margin of error than the same valuation conducted through system 2. A ready observation of pedestalization for instance, is that such valuations have been conducted in a system 1 fashion, with little attention being paid to identify the underlying axioms and premises of such a valuation.

The characteristic of system 1 is that it trades speed for accuracy, much in the same manner that shooting from the hip does for firearms. When conducting such a valuation or superficial analysis, one must always be mindful that the probability of error increases at every level of the judgment. Not only do we have access to limited data, we will tend to value what little data we have very highly, but we lack enough to identify a pattern within the observations, our sample size is very small, and we are prone to make rapid decisions. Thus, it follows that our snap-valuations of others will be heavily biased by these factors. When the context factor is added, for instance by the person being put in a position of power, in an environment with a high volume of social proof, or other situation our valuations will increase, if the converse contexts take place, our judgment of their value will be less. Continue reading →

Internal and External Value Multipliers

“A multiplier is a very simple concept, it’s an added variable that either serves to increase or decrease a given value. “

One of the things I think I neglected to adequately cover in that essay is the fact that a multiplier can be both positive and negative, and how it is regarded may be context dependent.

It’s quite common to make the distinction between internal factors in a company that contribute to its performance, and external factors that affect its performance. The idea of “core competencies” is perhaps the clearest formulation of how a company’s unique configuration of competencies, qualities and traits can become a source of competitive advantage. Examples would be 3M’s focus on innovation and new products, WalMart’s focus on high volume logistics, or Apples focus on high quality design work.

When applying the core competencies principle to a person the internal multipliers would be those things that alter the behavior of a given variable or set of variables based on a person’s internal characteristics. Men who write “How to vet a wife” articles often draw on such variables as a woman’s history of self control, loyalty or self-discipline, not due to these factors in and of themselves, but because the combination of these variables build a barrier towards external negative multipliers.

A woman who has a combination of love for family, traditional values and self-discipline as a core competency is according to these men a better prospect for marriage because they act as barriers for promiscuity, divorce and impulsive behavior, all of which are encouraged externally in our present social order.

External multipliers are those a person has little control over and which exist outside of that person. For instance, most are familiar with the example of going out with a wing who is shorter than you, so that you look taller by comparison. Likewise a woman may be a 10 in a small town, but a 6 in Los Angeles or Miami where beautiful women tend to congregate.

In my day job I’ve frequently utilized examples such as industry legal issues, or multi-national legal issues as an example of external negative multipliers, as these have a negative effect on the revenues of each company within an industry, yet are unrelated to the aspects of performance that a company has control over. Continue reading →

Contextual Value

In various forms of business, one will often experience conflicting valuations in some form or another. In finance, it’s quite clear from the outline in an upcoming section of this post that there can be many different valuations for a company. Likewise, within marketing one can have differing valuations for a new product or a market depending on the underlying premises one utilizes when conducting an analysis. A fairly common method to establish the potential market size for a brick-and-mortar business is to determine how many people live in the area where the business will operate, then how many of those are potential customers and how frequently they will need the services offered by the company. In this simple mathematical problem, the definitions of “operating area”, “potential customers” and “frequency of service”, will greatly affect the valuation of the project.

The idea of contextual value is that things outside of an item influence the value placed upon that item by rational actors. The most simple example is how an item for which there is high demand tends to be viewed as more valuable than an item for which there is little if any demand. Some prefer to look at demand as an indicator of value, meaning that high value products will also have a correspondingly high demand, however this is a conflation of a products’ capability for satisfying a need, with the product’s popularity. While one can easily argue that there are correlations between product quality and product popularity, the correlation between the variables are varied.

It is entirely possible to have a low quality product, for which there is high demand, or a high quality product for which there is low demand. Within the dating sphere this often takes the form of “social proof”, which as a variable influences the value of the product either up or down. However, social proof is transitory, as it is composed of variables that communicate and signal high value within a social group. Thus, many of the factors that lead to high social proof, are in and of themselves a part of the product, they are in fact the joint subjective perceptions of the product communicated externally. Continue reading →

One of the major projects I’ve undertaken since I started writing this blog was an attempt to break down sexual market value in a more objective manner that it had previously been. The end goal of this endeavor was to give men less of a shifting and intangible target for their self-improvement journey. On one hand one could easily argue that the manosphere has already provided men with a guide regarding how to increase their own value, yet on the other hand the composition and influence of different variables on the overall result of the equation means that the certainty that many men seek is still elusive.

This is perhaps one of the more worrisome aspects of writing for our little corner on the internet, that for every man that grasps that the red pill and associated literature is in fact intangible and abstract, there are 100 who cry out for iron-clad science. This is hardly surprising given that there appears to be a proliferation of “engineering minded” men within the manosphere, and one of the cardinal traits of engineers is finding solutions with a high degree of robustness. Perhaps this is the source of the attraction to the traditional PUA literature, where one was offered a model with the promise that if you executed it correctly it would lead to the desired result every time. Naturally, this had some challenges, primarily the fact that by positioning the model as being 100% accurate, it places the entire source of failure on a man’s execution of the model. This has an unfortunate similarity to academic economics, where one blames reality when it does not conform to the mathematical models.

Much of The Red pill and associated literature is scientifically based, but a great majority of the literature is extrapolated from a literature base that is very rarely identified or cited by the author, in this regard they are more theoretical frameworks than they are scientific conclusions. One could argue the red pill as a decentralized research project, the literature base consists of various scientific studies and literature, ranging from evolutionary biology and psychology, economics, sociology and various others, the theoretical frameworks are constructed by various authors from this base, and the theories are tested through experiments in the field and finally they are reported through field reports. After enough field testing has been done, the theory can be amended to include the new data.

However, the downside of this model is that the context of the experiments are not strictly controlled. The field experiments are done by a range of different men, in different locations, in various cultures, and situations. While this can have a positive side in that the experiments will demonstrate different contexts, there is no control of many of the variables involved in the experiments. For instance, in order to be entirely certain about a result, the same man should approach the same target repeatedly while varying different variables such as appearance, status signals, wealth and other associated value symbols. This would permit the experiment to demonstrate the effect of altering only a single variable. This is naturally not possible, as the first approach would change the target’s state and thus the experiments that followed would have questionable results, a variant of the observer effect. Continue reading →